Every marketing effort works towards achieving your business goals. To meet these goals, you need clear plans that are executed properly. And, in order to have an effective marketing strategy, you need to track its progress.
To do that, you need to know what metrics you’ll be measuring.
We have a popular ebook focusing on the 6 metrics that truly matter to the business, but there are a lot more that you’re likely to be tracking and optimising before you get to the stage of reporting back on your progress.
Metrics are measurable values used by your teams to track the effectiveness of your campaigns. They serve as guideposts towards achieving your goal, identifying whether you’re still on the right track. At the same time, metrics will let you know if there is something wrong.
Additionally, metrics translate your customer’s vague behaviour into actionable numbers. This, in turn, provides an accurate measurement of your campaign’s efficiency. They’re used to inform you whether you’re meeting your customer’s expectation or if there is still room for improvement.
Once you track your metrics, you can improve the overall results of your marketing efforts and align them towards your overall business objectives.
Although almost every action can be measured, it doesn’t mean you should. There are tons of metrics you can track but doing so is not always advisable nor effective. Instead, focus on important marketing metrics that can be turned into actionable plans. Otherwise you can get bogged down in the numbers and never make any real progress.
These metrics can give you an oversight of how your content is performing and how people are interacting with your site.
A word of caution – focusing on a single metric can give you a skewed idea of results. For example, bounce rates get quite a lot of attention, and obviously you want to keep them as low as possible. But if your contact page has a high bounce rate, there is a decent likelihood that people are finding that page, getting the information they need (your location or phone number), and using it. They don’t need to spend much time browsing, because they know what they want and they’ve found it. So look at the wider context of behaviour before focusing on any individual number.
You can find these metrics on Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
SEO metrics are designed to give an idea of your website’s standing in search results, or against the measures that we know search engines use as part of their ranking algorithms. It’s not exhaustive – Google especially does not release full details of what goes into determining a site’s ranking for different keywords, but these factors are definitely relevant.
Organic click through rate: Ratio of click throughs in the search engine results
Most of these metrics need to be found through sources outside Google – using paid services like SEMrush and AHrefs, or sometimes through freemium services like Moz and UberSuggest.
A word of caution: Domain Authority and Page Authority are not hard and fast numbers. If you check each of the tools mentioned, you’ll get a different number on each of them. The key here is to consistently use the same tool to check, so you can see trends over time, and use the same tool to benchmark your site against competitors, rather than focusing on the number itself.
Likes, comments, and shares are what’s known as “vanity metrics” – if you get a lot of likes but no one ever comes to your site or buys anything from you, there’s no tangible benefit. So don’t focus too much on these, and instead use conversions as your key metric.
If you want to increase brand awareness, then reach and impressions are important, and shares can help achieve that, so they’re not useless metrics by any means. Make sure you focus on the metrics that actually measure what you’re trying to achieve.
A word of caution: many email clients don’t effectively provide data on whether or not an email has been opened – this is why you’ll sometimes see an email with clicks but no opens. So don’t get hung up on your open rate number, it’s almost certainly incorrect. What you can do, however, is look for trends (especially when you’re sending to the same database) to see which emails have higher or lower than average open rates.
Spam rates are important – too high, and your email provider (like HubSpot or MailChimp) may prevent you from sending emails in future, to protect their systems. Make sure you have a legitimate database, don’t buy contacts, don’t send too many emails in quick succession, and tidy up your database regularly.
When you’re spending money, metrics are even more important. A PPC or social ad campaign should have a clear purpose. Once you know what that is, you can accurately measure success against the cost of the campaign. Don’t forget to include time in the cost calculations, too.
Now that you’ve identified the important metrics you should track, you should now prioritise them based on your goals. Metrics that are prioritised based on your current goal are your key performance indicators (KPI.)
KPIs are direct indicators of your progress towards a given goal or objective. These are values measured to understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and how it impacts your success.
Although there can be multiple metrics you can track simultaneously, it’s recommended to focus on a small number of KPIs.
In order to choose which of your metrics are to be considered as KPIs, it’s important to go back to your goals. Understand which metric directly correlates with achieving your goal. Then, focus on other relevant metrics as you achieve milestones in your goals.
As every business is unique, your KPIs should be as well. Understand what you want to achieve for the overall growth of your business, create goals, execute strategies, and keep track of your progress!